Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The great civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King said:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Of all his famous quotes, this is Martin Luther King's finest, because it goes to the heart of what really matters—the individual and not the identity. That is the difference between the coalition and the Labor-Greens alliance. We believe in the individual, based on mutual respect, whereas they prejudge people, based on identity, and then attack that identity. Liberal democracies are built on the notion all people are created equal. Respect for the individual and how that individual treats other individuals is the foundation of a fair society.

It was this belief that drove great thinkers like Locke and Voltaire and great statesmen like Washington and Jefferson to argue and fight to give people the right to vote, the protection of property and the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of association. Who can forget the words of the great American forefathers when they wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed … with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

You can contrast these quotes with Senator Wong's provocative comments:

We are no longer trapped in the ignorance of our own assumptions and prejudice, premised on the underlying supremacism of the narrative that white people know best.

Senator Wong shows her own ignorance and prejudice by assuming non-Indigenous Australians are ignorant and prejudiced. To assume that non-Indigenous Australians believe in some supremacist narrative is an insult to our tolerant way of life—